Travel may be easier now than it was in the days of steamer trunks, Pullman cars, and foldout maps, but planning a trip can still be maddening. When we started AIR MAIL, an integral part of it was our Arts Intel Report. It was, and is, an absolutely unique and useful search tool to help travelers plan their trips around their particular passions.
Let’s say you love ballet and are going to be in Berlin in October. You can type those words into the search part of the Arts Intel Report and you will get a listing of the best ballet offerings for that month in that city. Not all performances, just ones that we consider the best.
If you want to see a Matisse exhibition in Tokyo in September, or hear Ray Chen play the violin in Sydney, or just have a good choucroute garnie in Paris this winter, the Arts Intel Report will give you not all the choices, just the best ones. Our editors select essential events around the world, including rock concerts, ballets, plays, gallery shows, museum exhibitions, fashion events, and nightclub acts, and gather the information all in one place. We also curate a list of restaurants and hotels close to where you will be.
Imagine you wisely waited until late September to go to Rome and, after breakfast on the terrace of the Hotel Locarno, wanted to see a different Michelangelo—say, Michelangelo Pistoletto, a beloved contemporary artist who, at 90, has a major retrospective through October 15 at the Chiostro del Bramante, near Piazza Navona. Our site would then urge you to walk 10 minutes and savor a leisurely seafood lunch at Pierluigi, a charming, high-end trattoria on Via di Monserrato, which tempts the likes of George Clooney and Colin Firth with fresh fish and specialties such as fried fior di zucca and vermicelli with clams and bottarga.
And because some people prefer to limit their travel to trips from the bedroom to the living room, our editors winnow down the best films and TV series to watch at home.
The Arts Intel Report was intended as an essential tool for readers with active passports and an interest in the world outside their native borders. We launched it along with the Saturday edition of AIR MAIL in mid-2019, and then nine months later the world shut down due to the pandemic. We continued to keep it updated in the knowledge that, at some point, the lockdown period would end and travel would resume. We spent that relatively fallow period reimagining, redesigning, and re-engineering the Arts Intel Report. The result is a travel tool we would want to use for ourselves: discerning, uncompromising, up to date. We think there is no other travel search site like it.
In the growing age of A.I., we still believe in H.I.—human intelligence. The Arts Intel Report is the searchable international guidebook built by people and for people who don’t trust guidebooks. You can try it out by using the link below. Go ahead. It’s free and it’s easy.
Graydon Carter and Alessandra Stanley are the Co-Editors at AIR MAIL